Show of hands: Who thinks the presidential election won’t be very close after all?

Everywhere I turn these days, I see political pundits declaring in tones of great certainty that this year’s presidential election will be razor-close.

I ain’t so sure about that.

Yes, for months now, the major polls have shown a tight race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. And, yes, the respective political strengths and weaknesses of the candidates seem to be pretty well balanced.

But I’ve got a suspicion that the vote tallies won’t be as close as conventional wisdom suggests. I see a popular-vote margin of at least seven percentage points and a fairly lopsided verdict in the Electoral College.

My reasoning here is simple: I just don’t think the electorate can remain so evenly divided over the next five months. The scales inevitably will shift. I’m not going to bother looking it up, but I suspect that few, if any, presidential races have remained close through spring, summer and early fall. It’s my guess that the close ones became close only in the final days.

Anyway, I think there’s only one chance in three that this election will be close. It’s more likely that the outcome will be a foregone conclusion by the weekend before Election Day.

What say you?

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1 Comment

That’s the first smart thing I’ve heard said about this election. Romney faces several structural hurdles that will accumulate into a significant margin of victory for Obama in November in my opinion: of evangelicals, mainline conservatives and Ron Paul independents registering as Republicans, only mainline conservatives will vote on Election Day in large numbers; there are too few of them left to make any difference except in the reddest of states; the anti-union tea party push has mostly fizzled, and it has awoken the sleeping giant of labor, and Obama’s re-election is where they are devoting most of their time and energy. And that doesn’t even get into the fact that the more people know about Romney, the less they like him. All polls are currently registering is people’s dissatisfaction with Obama, not their interest in electing Romney. In truth, they have more interest in staying home than electing either.